Posted on September 18, 2022 / by Webmaster / in IT knowledge base

How to pick the best domain name?

Choosing a domain name for your new website could be fun, challenge and sometimes frustrated. There are many ways to name. But you do not always have the total control. To begin with, the chosen name is part of your branding. Somehow it must be reflecting what you’re doing, be it a business website or a personal blog. There have to be some connections. A good domain name will give you strategic advantages in promoting your brand and website. The second major issue is availability. There are billions of domain names that have been registered nowadays. Your most desirable name might have already been taken. You need to compromise, use a different domain extension or search for something else entirely. As a full service web developer, we do not just care for the technicalities of your website, be it a simple WordPress website or a highly custom made web projects, we take care everything you need to make your website perform. So we’ve prepared herewith some useful tips that you should read before you start your search journey. These tips will help you avoid making mistakes and pick the best domain name for your new website. Let’s get started.

#1 Keep your domain name short and memorable

Rule number one is KISS – keep it short and simple. We all know that the longer and more complicated names are harder to remember. And it’s not just for people in general, Google likes short domains too. They are easier to remember, share and type which helps users navigate directly to your site without any hiccups. If you listen to Google, she recommends to keep your domain name to no more than 3 to 4 terms.

The other advantage we see here is short domains are concise and clear. So aesthetically they are prettier. The most important thing to remember for this tenet is to keep your domain name as short as you possibly can while still giving it certain uniqueness and catchiness.

#2 Make it easy to say and spell

Besides its length, you need a domain that is easy to say and spell for the same reasons. That is if someone heard your domain name over the phone or at a noisy environment, could they actually spell it?

The Radio Test

Call (not email) your friends and ask them if they can spell the names you’ve come up with. This is to test whether they could spell it correctly over the phone or at a bar. You might be surprised at how many domain names fail this test! And sadly ours included 😐

#3 Avoid hyphens and double-letters

Something with an odd combination of letters, numbers, hyphens, dashes, or other workarounds will be hard to spell, easy to forget and likely to result in typos. They lead to lots of cases of mistaken identity. And in the worse case, these names look kind of spammy and untrustworthy.

Here are two examples. As can be seen some owners use a hyphenated name simply because the .com name they want is already taken. First these names lack uniqueness and cause confusion as we have pointed out. Then we can certainly deduce what will happen if users forget to enter the hyphen. Practically those users will just go to the other website, not yours.

In the second example, let’s take a look at this domain coffeeexperts.com. The double letters of f and e in coffee is not the problem. They belong to the same word. What bothers us is the first letter ‘e’ of the word experts. Together with the last two e’s in coffee, they don’t make the domain name any better, but a funny or dreaded triple e’s. Psychologically it can be tricky and people just happen to make a lot of mistakes when they type something like this in. So try to turn away from it.

#4 Dot-com versus dot-something-else

A new collection of top domain extensions such as .store, .space, .actor has emerged this past decade. Some of them sound kind of surprisingly trendy and cool while many others are very industry-specific. Like .lawyer which could be a great fit for a law firm. Many owners would just opt for these alternatives if their wanted .com names are already taken or too expensive to acquire.

In our opinion these alternate top domain extensions aren’t good choices either. Needless to explain, they have the similar inborn defects with hyphenated domain names. Furthermore people just have a very deep built-in association with .com’s. So if your wanted .com name isn’t available. Rather than just using .net, we recommend first try to edit the name of the .com that you possibly can. If you still can’t land on anything acceptable as a .com, then your second choice would either be the .net, .co or .hk. But yet keep away from using .fancies, .industries or .trendies.

#5 Going for something classy and branded vs something more keyword-rich

This is probably one of the biggest dilemmas when it comes to domain naming. So what are the pros and cons for each of these.

Perhaps you can first look at bestpubsinhongkong.com versus hongkonghops.com. By comparison do they have any differences? Indeed one feels more like a legit business because it’s branded. The other one feels you are going to click through to a roundup style blog article. What we need to consider though, choosing something that’s purely branded won’t give you any edge when it comes to online search and Google rankings (SEO). Particularly when yours is a new website, you need all the help to get there.

So there is a blended approach that you may use. The trick is to combine your business name and your top keyword phrase into your domain name. So for a bakery shop that named ‘Ho Hay Foon’, instead of using hohayfoon.com we may use hhfbakery.com. It is very simple. ‘hhf’ is your abbreviated branding and bakery is your keyword. What we have to achieve here is to find the happy medium between a version of your business name and the keywords.

Before we wrap up this article, there are few more points to take note of:

Don’t use words that are too specific

You might have a vision for what your company will do or sell, but are you sure it won’t expand to something else? Let’s say you’re creating a site that will only sell baseball gloves. Using the term ‘gloves’ in your domain might seem smart. But what happens a few years from now when you decide you want to expand and sell baseball bats?

Don’t use words that might cause confusion

Avoid words that might have totally unrelated connotations. For example, you want to describe how the cakes of your bakery shine with brilliance. In such case you may think of using the word ‘bloom’. Cause in bakers’ terms, bloom refers to the sheen on a cake, especially when using gelatine. However, this usage may not be known to most people who are not pastry chefs. They may just think you’re in the flower business.

A matching name in your social channels

You might have found a great domain name. They best is you can get also a matching name in your social channels. Albeit it’s not a deal-killer. Your domain and social media page or channel names don’t have to be an exact match. But for branding purposes, it’s worth to take a look into it.

Trademark search

Make sure your domain name doesn’t infringe an existing registered trademark. If it does you may end up having to change your domain later. That could mean a significant cost and loss of business.

#6 The selection of a top-level domain (TLD) can significantly impact the success of your link building

In fact, as Sebastian Galanternik, SEO Manager at Crehana aptly pointed out in an interview with Ahrefs: as it affects both your website and brand perception among your target audience, the choice of TLD can also have a significant impact on the reception of your outreach efforts.

According to Sebastian, when building links beyond your home country in South America, it is crucial to consider whether a generic TLD (gTLD) or a country code TLD (ccTLD) is more suitable. Interestingly, numerous leading Spanish websites based in Argentina are registered under a .com domain for making their link building endeavors easier.

There is a quite interesting finding about this. A Peruvian website is tended to link to content on example.com than on example.ar. Although Argentinian links may be more valuable in specific scenarios, a gTLD opens up more opportunities for link building in this case. Therefore, carefully selecting the appropriate TLD can significantly enhance your link building success.

It is no rocket science

As you have read, it is not rocket science that you need in choosing a domain name for your website. And yet the name you are going to use has to align and exhibit the identity and nature of your business. All you need to do is to search and ask everybody around, together with a bit of thoughtfulness and creativity.

About Wavyos Technologies

We are a full service IT company specialized in website, mobile app design & development, and SEO (Google rankings). Our team is more than happy to be of service to your business in any of these areas. Please feel free to drop us a line for a free consult.

Email: [email protected]

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